Question for the Coffee Experts [General]

2011 Apr 2
I have an electric percolator that I have used for years. I prefer it to a drip machine. I like the taste of the perked coffee and that it stays much hotter after brewing this way. Here is the problem: it seems that the quantity of coffee required to brew a nice strong pot of coffee varies. For perking I grind the beans fairly coarsely in an adjustable burr grinder, but sometimes, despite increasing the quantity of coffee, the brewed coffee can be quite weak. I know there are a ton of coffee experts on here, so maybe someone can advise me what I'm doing wrong? I don't want to waste any more precious beans. I normally use a little more than 1 heaping tablespoon per cup of water. This morning I used about 2 tbsp of coarsely ground coffee per cup and it was still very pale. Help?

2011 Apr 3
Either there are no coffee experts here or no one wants to comment on percolated coffee.
Hmmm, I'll speculate even though I haven't used a perc in years, if that's OK.
What comes to mind are the amount of coffee used per cup of water, the roast level of the coffee, and the origin of the coffee. Imo even 2 Tbs coffee per 8 fl oz water makes for a weak coffee - my wife uses 4 Tbs (1/4 cup) per 8 fl oz water in brewing in a press pot; I use even more, but I weigh it, using about 15g per 250 g of water; using an 8 "cup" press pot I add 45 g coffee, tare, then add 750g ie about 24-26 fl oz, getting our 3 morning mugs worth of joe. I find medium roasted coffee needs more coffee - the flavours are more subtle and there are more of them than in a darker roast, so you may find you need to use more coffee when using the medium roasts than when using the darker roast. And of course coffees from different parts of the world have different characteristics, so going from one to another may require an adjustment in the amount used to brew your cup. How it all works in a perc is similar, I speculate, but if I were to guess one reason only for the paleness (and I speculate you also experienced a thinness of flavour) it's got more to do with the depth of roasting of the beans.
So, it boils down to this: if you control all variables and brew 2 coffees using similar amounts of coffee and water (by weight) and perc the same time and one is "paler" than the other I would think that most of the difference is due to the level roast of the bean and less to the origin of the bean.
I likely don't know any more than you, blubarry, cause I'm no expert! Just curious.
And now it's time for a cuppa joe!

2011 Apr 3
I've never used a perc so can't help you

2011 Apr 3
Have you tried a slightly finer grind? (you may not be getting all the flavour 'out of' the grind depending on how long it brews); that said, you don't want to extract too much flavour, or you'll get bitter coffee...safer to just add more coffee. What kind of coffee are you using? Perhaps you need to step up to something bolder so that you can get the flavour you want, without adding 4 tbsps per cup...

2011 Apr 3
Thanks people. I tried this morning, finer grind and used 19 tablespoons for 10 cups coffee. It was darker and with a stronger flavour, and without being any more bitter. Can't get my head around it, but tomorrow will try with even more coffee, same finer grind, and see how it goes. And I will never give up my percolator. I have three in case they ever become even harder to find LOL.

2011 Apr 3
Haha THREE! Now that's future-proofing!

2011 Apr 4
While using a Perk, you are fairly restricted. You only really have about 5 variables to play with realistically.

1) The type of coffee including roast (Dark roasts might impart more flavour)
2) The gind size (finer grind = more flavour extracted though there might be a limit)
3) The quantity of coffee
4) The perking time.

I don't have one myself, So I can't offer that much advice. Still, experimentation with more of those variables might help you brew the perfect cuppa.

2011 Apr 4
seems that once you go past a certain point with the quantity of coffee, it actually gets weaker. I increased the quantity this morning and had to tamp the coffee down to get more in the basket. It had just the opposite of the desired effect, in that the water didn't penetrate the packed coffee, and just poured over the top of the basket, making an even weaker brew LOL. so end result is that I can max out the quantity in the basket, without tamping, and the finer grind does help, but I will probably have to get a darker roast than the one I was using. I have no problem with the darker roasts. Thanks everybody.

2011 Apr 20
Hi Blubarry,

Assuming your device works in the same fashion as a traditional stovetop/moka pot (displacement by water vapour force hot water up a spout and through the bed of coffee) I thought I would recommend to you Square Mile Coffee Roaster's instructional video on stovetop coffee.

www.squaremileblog.com

Stovetop coffee is fairly tricky given that it's difficult to control your brew ratio (water:dry coffee -- ideally 17:1 or so) and temperatures can get quite high. Overextraction is quite likely -- on lighter roasts this will result in a grainy/branny and bitter cup and in a darker roast you'd get a lot of tarry aromatics and bitters.

Those thoughts aside, if you're enjoying it then that's what matters!

Also: Andy's recommendation to weigh your water and ground coffee is an extremely good one. Volumetric measurements are too inaccurate and inconsistent for small batch brewing. A general target is 60g/litre (which is what Andy also recommended).


2011 Apr 20
Thanks everybody. Since the percolator is automatic, and I can't control the perk time, I have one less variable to play with. I did adjust my grind to much finer than I normally do, and that was a big improvement, but I do need to play with the volumes depending on the roast. I think that perking is probably not the right method for light roast coffees, unless I wanted to make only a couple of cups. And weighing the volumes did help as well. Thanks again to all who offerred suggestions. Still love my percolator though, and recently bought an ancient coffee urn that uses percolation but will make a party sized volume of coffee at once. Condemn me if you want coffee fanatics, but I'm nothing if not committed.

2011 Apr 20
Just another thought for you - I'm looking into Kalita single-cup pour-overs right now. Aside from press pot, doing small batches of coffee on anything but an expensive Technivorm dripper is quite difficult to do accurately and consistently. It's possible that the dripper below may have resolved some of the common issues when combined with a good pour-over kettle (also linked is one I quite like).

shop.wreckingballcoffee.com

www.homeloo.com

I won't conderm you for loving percolators, but I'll happily try to persuade you to try other methods :)

2011 Apr 20
I fell in love with percolators again when I started camping. And the vintage electric ones have a mid-century modern kind of aesthetic that I love, but that Kalita one also looks very cool.

2011 Apr 21
Yes, people tend to love the foods and tastes they grew up with. But if you like the bitter taste in coffee from a percolator, you can probably achieve the same result, under more control, with a French Press. You will need to steep it for longer than 5 minutes, and I recommend giving it a quick stir every couple of minutes.

2011 Apr 21
A small note about using weight instead of volume...

It makes perfect sense to do that for the coffee (especially as the weight/volume ratio can vary a lot), but not really for the water. One milliliter of water weighs one gram (or one liter weighs one kilogram). Variations due to temperature and pressure do occur, but at any temperature likely to occur in a kitchen, they are really too small to influence the results.

2011 Apr 21
Hi Isabelle,

That's actually precisely why you'd want to weigh your water as opposed to preparing by volume. I think water expands by around 4% between ~22C and 100C. The important variable in coffee preparation is the mass of water used, as opposed to volume.

...so I guess the recipe should technically be revised from "60g/litre" to "60g/kilo". :)

Ian

2011 Apr 21
And in my experience perked coffee is not bitter if you keep all the parts clean. I do have a french press that I use occasionally, but I make 10 to 12 cups every morning, and for us, the choice is therefore perked or drip, and we find the perked stays hotter and has a better flavor than drip. But we are definitely not as demanding as some of the ultra particular coffee fans on here. But bread for the toast that goes with my coffee is something I can get excited about.

2011 Apr 21
I don't think I've ever had perked coffee. But since the water is recirculating through the grounds I thought it would probably get bitter.

Isabelle / IClark, yes I have a cookbook about cooking ratios and everything is given as units of weight, not volume.


2011 Apr 21
Well, I'd consider less than 5% variation to be non-significative for any recipe done in a kitchen and not in a chemistry lab. Even pastry doesn't need that level of accuracy... and that is good because you can't really trust a kitchen scale to be more accurate than that. But maybe your scale and your taste buds are more accurate than mine ;-)

I find it fascinating to see what level of detail some people go in the quest for perfect coffee.

To get back to the percolator, one other thing I haven't seen suggested here is adding a paper filter (basket type, with a small hole carefully cut in the middle for the tube) in the coffee compartment and using a fine grind. It is not conventional, but is a good technique if you happen to only have fine ground coffee. I know, fresh ground is best, but I don't have a coffee grinder (or electricity) at the fishing camp, which is the only place I use a percolator (works great on the woodstove).

2011 Apr 22
Thanks Isabelle, and I forgot to mention that I do use a paper filter, sometimes one at the bottom AND one on top of the ground coffee. It is getting extremely difficult to find the small round type of filters though, and I usually buy them in 1000's when I am in the states. Mr. Coffee makes one that is a big square sheet that you can use different ways, so I use that one for the gigantic old coffee urn, but I also take them when I go to hotels, because then I can easily use my own coffee in those nasty little in-room drip machines.

2011 Apr 22
Hi Isabelle,

You need one of these for the fishing camp . . .

www.amazon.ca

That's actually a very good price at Amazon.ca, because I've seen these selling for twice that on US coffee sites with shipping extra. The Amazon.ca one has free shipping. It's a very good grinder for fine grinds. And you can make it a very good grinder for coarse grinds too, with some simple modifications.

www.home-barista.com

2011 Apr 22
I call "poo-poo" on the "freshly ground" myth. Grind your coffee at home and take to camp that way. If it was freshly roasted before being ground it will still be fantastic coffee for a few days at very least. Pepper too, for that matter.

2011 Apr 22
Oh, we do have a manual coffee grinder at the fishing camp (similar mechanism, but with a wood casing). But it couldn't really do much to solve the problem when all that was left in the pantry was fine ground, not whole beans ;-p The next time, we remembered to bring more coffee.

I don't know if I'm ready to try roasting coffee beans on the woodstove, but it could be an interesting thing to try...

2011 Apr 22
Hey I said I rediscovered perked coffee when I was camping. Tent camping. Many years ago.

Camping for me though has now changed, and I have an electric percolator, a coffee grinder for beans, and what we now refer to as the "camping le creuset" cast iron in the RV. I am just looking for my mussel pan so I can do moules mariniere by the river next weekend....I think sometimes we do more cooking in the trailer than we do at home.

2011 Apr 23
In theory, :-) a peculator should not make good coffee (like I said I've never tried it). Even with drip machines the water forms channels through the grounds, so the coffee adjacent to the channels is over extracted and the coffee elsewhere is under extracted. I would think this would be even more the case with a peculator, with the water recirculating back through.

A French press extracts evenly. So does espresso, which is basically steam distillation under pressure.

2011 Aug 15
I saw a Betty Crocker Cordless Coffee Percolator on sale at the Giant Tiger in the Market for $17. I picked it up to see what this is all about.

Supposedly makes coffee both strong and hot.

But googling, I see you can do all kinds of things with a percolator - make hot punch, cocoa, cinnamon spiced coffee, etc..

It will be fun to see what I can get out of it !

2011 Aug 15
Francis I have a large party sized percolating coffee urn and I have filled the basket with sliced oranges, cinnamon sticks and cloves and done mulled wine as well.

2011 Aug 15
@bluberry, I've found some recipes for purculator cider too:

www.cooks.com/rec/search/0,1-0,apple_cider_percolator,FF.html

Care to share your wine and fruit punch recipe?

Someone on kijiji is selling a perculator:

ottawa.kijiji.ca

Also they may be available at Value Village . . .

2011 Aug 15
I don't consider myself a coffee expert, but I'd like to contribute to the "freshly ground beans" part of this discussion.

Another important part of the coffee-making process which coffee aficionados always consider is the length of time between roasting the beans and grinding the beans. I wonder how long those beans in the grocery stores sit around...and how long ago they were roasted!

Equator Roasters (www.equator.ca/) is located in the little bedroom community of Almonte. They roast their beans on-site. All of their coffee is fair trade. Their brand-new location features a lovely patio area and locally-made art hanging on the walls which visitors can purchase. They also sell a variety of fair trade items.

There are many Almonte residents who bypass Tim Horton's on their way to the city each morning in order to pick up their coffee at Equator's.

It is truly a "diamond in the rough" in this little town. Well worth the drive, just to smell it!!

(I swear I don't have any association with Equator Roasters, other than I love their coffee!)

2011 Aug 15
Francis, my coffee urn mulled wine was just an experiment, so there wasn't really a recipe. I filled the basket with sliced oranges studded with cloves and a handful of cinnamon sticks (or probably they were cassia, as I've learned from reading Ottawa Foodies) I just filled the urn with red wine and turned it on. Yes it boiled the wine, which was probably not a good thing, but it also kept it hot for the duration of the party and kept about 20 people happy on a cold winter night.

I have the cuisinart percolator, which is great because you get to see the coffee bubbling up in the clear knob on top. I have been looking for years for an old Farberware model. Also have the plastic regal "Poly perk" model that I use when I'm camping. It's a lovely shade of avocado green with space age starburst designs on the side.

If you buy an old one second hand, make sure it's got all the parts as they are all but impossible to replace. I also use the circular paper filters in the basket which are increasingly hard to find.

2011 Aug 15
and that one on kijiji looks like a cuisinart. Make sure the knob fits tightly. they do tend to lose their seal and leak after a few years, but you can buy the replacement knobs at Paradis on Bank St.

2011 Aug 16
@blubarry,

Re: filters

I wonder if it would be possible to simply poke a hole in the middle of a paper drip filter and put that in the basket?

2011 Aug 16
Francis, you can do that but the fit is awkward. Best to find the small discs if you can, or you can buy Mr. Coffee filters that are like flat squares; they are thinner and more pliable than basket filters and they make cleanup a snap because you can fold the excess over the top of the coffee as well, and it makes for a tidy bundle of grounds after brewing.

2011 Aug 16
Everyone in office likes the percolator coffee! I put a spoon of cinnamon into the basket as well. Some people likened it to good coffee they had camping. Some said it was just like they remembered 20 years ago . . . interesting.

According to coffee purists, you should never (1) overheat / reheat coffee and (2) over-extraction leads to bitterness. Neither of those things happened.

Actually perhaps the above two points are already refuted by the existence of espresso. If boiling water is too hot, then steam - which is even hotter - should be way too hot. And steam distillation pretty much takes everything out of the espresso puck - if that isn't "over-extraction" what is?

The Betty Crocker Percolator I got at Giant Tiger is like the one on the right, but it has two lights, green and red. It starts percolating right away (heating from the base of the stem?) and stops I guess when the contents of the pot reach a preset temperature.

2011 Aug 16
Francis, my favorite thing about perked coffee vs. drip is that it stays so hot!

2011 Aug 16
Francis and blubarry thanks for bumping up this thread and making brilliant suggestions-;) I inherited my Mom's old Pyrex perculator (pictured on the right) which I haven't used in ages since I rarely drink coffee anymore. The perculator cider and mulled wine is a brilliant idea! Now I just have to wait for the temperatures to cool down abit so I can start experimenting. (It's still 80 degrees in my apartment even with the air conditioner on. I don't like the heat too much so bring on winter!) (#endrant)